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During one of the many excellent conversations I've had with my wonderful wife, I made the comment that "every metaphor breaks down eventually." The folks we know will not be surprised by such a comment, of course, but, as I think about the things leading up to several of my recent posts to this webspace, it becomes clear to me that the concept's a bit less open than might be hoped. In essence, the idea is that any comparison can only go so far before it fails. Usually, this means that every comparison--tacit or explicit--runs itself into stupidity at some point. The fun comes when it arrives at the point with only a short trip to get there.
An example that stands out in my part of the world is the ubiquity of "Come and Take It" star-and-cannon iconography. It's sensible enough on its surface; Texas schoolchildren are exhorted from an early age to "Remember Goliad," above which such a banner flew during the early Texas Revolution, and the early training sticks with people long. But it's not simply a matter of remembrance; those same schoolchildren are exhorted to "Remember the Alamo," and they do, but it is not the Shrine to Texas Liberty that adorns trucks with gun racks. No, it is instead a claim--rather, a belligerent proclamation--of firearms ownership, a challenge to what is seen as a hostile, foreign, colonialist government to take dearly-held weapons.
I will admit that there is some justification in seeing the government of the United States as hostile and colonialist, though to have it called foreign by the people who typically make the challenge strikes me as being disingenuous. So the metaphor falters there. It fails, though, in that those who make the challenge seem not to remember Goliad as much as they ought to if they'll display its banner (or an update of it, replacing the cannon with one form of assault-style weapon or another). For the forces to which the garrison at Goliad made the challenge did come there, and they did take the cannon--and the lives of its defenders. And the difference in might between that garrison and its attackers is far exceeded by the difference in strength between the people who display the icon on their trucks and the government they fear will make the attempt upon them (even as they demand that its officers and iconography be honored even by those who know themselves to be oppressed by that government and its officers). Perhaps they are stating their willingness to die, down to the last and least, to preserve their gun ownership, though I rather think most have not thought to that end; those whom I have known have tended to think that they would be the victorious exception instead of a nameless corpse joining many others in a hastily-dug graveyard.
There are other examples to be found, of course. In times when I hoped I might make teaching my career, rather than the side-job it has become for me, I used such examples of failing metaphors as exercises for my students; I have looked for them, and I have found them in abundance. But that there are many is not a comfort. I know I make no few, and what their inevitable failures say about me is not something I particularly want to consider.